In David Kowalski’s debut novel, The Company of the Dead, you have the Titanic, time travel as well as future Kennedy and Lightholler* families. The book juggles between the original Titanic story and a future caused by a change to the Titanic’s fate. The future looks a lot like Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle with America split between the Germans and the Japanese.

For those of you not familiar with Titanic history, Charles Lightholler was the second officer and the highest ranked officer to survive and tell his story (including how due to his late demotion from first officer to second officer, the original second officer was no longer on the ship and had the only keys to the binocular case on the Titanic).

While the book spends a little too much time in the future (and gets bogged down in places), it’s still a fun read and as fast-paced as a 750+ page novel can be. So, let’s see what happens when you let the Titanic’s watch have high-tech binoculars before the crash.

Continue reading →

IO9 has an excerpt from David Kowalski’s  The Company of the Dead and it sounds like an interesting alternate history novel. From the blurb:

The journey begins with a mysterious man aboard the Titanic on its doomed voyage. His mission? To save the ship. The result of his efforts is a world where the United States never entered World War I, thus launching the secret history of the 20th Century. Fast-forward to April 2012 and Joseph Kennedy, relation of John F. Kennedy, lives in an America occupied on the East Coast by Greater Germany and on the West Coast by Imperial Japan. He is one of six people who can restore history to its rightful order – even though it may mean his own death.

 The book comes out next week (March 13, 2012 for those of you reading this in the future), but the IO9 article has an excerpt for you to read now.